Good piece in the NY Times: No One Knows What Britain Is Anymore
The ambitious Mr. Johnson was crucial to the victory of Brexit in the June 2016 referendum. But for many, the blusterings of Boris have lost their charm. The “great ship” he loves to cite is a nationalist fantasy, a remnant of Britain’s persistent post-imperial confusion about its proper place in the world, hanging on to expensive symbols like a nuclear deterrent while its once glorious navy is often incapable of patrolling its own coastline*.
Britain — renowned for its pragmatism, its common sense, its political stability and its unabashed devotion to small business (“a nation of shopkeepers”) — has become nearly unrecognizable to its European allies.
[*With a link to this Independent article informing us that, to patrol its 7,723 mile-long coastline, the UK has a grand total of… 3 vessels, with a Border Force ridiculously understaffed and under-resourced at airports, ports, in immigration services etc. and woefully inadequate to deal with illegal immigration/immigrants – predominantly people/students who overstay their visas – who number over 1 million people according to recent internal Home Office documentation. A lot of this is a consequence of the dramatic cuts, poor outsourcings, mismanagement of resources etc. that we've seen over the last three decades, a reality highlighted in the excellent book "Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All" that I presented in this post.]
The ambitious Mr. Johnson was crucial to the victory of Brexit in the June 2016 referendum. But for many, the blusterings of Boris have lost their charm. The “great ship” he loves to cite is a nationalist fantasy, a remnant of Britain’s persistent post-imperial confusion about its proper place in the world, hanging on to expensive symbols like a nuclear deterrent while its once glorious navy is often incapable of patrolling its own coastline*.
Britain — renowned for its pragmatism, its common sense, its political stability and its unabashed devotion to small business (“a nation of shopkeepers”) — has become nearly unrecognizable to its European allies.
[*With a link to this Independent article informing us that, to patrol its 7,723 mile-long coastline, the UK has a grand total of… 3 vessels, with a Border Force ridiculously understaffed and under-resourced at airports, ports, in immigration services etc. and woefully inadequate to deal with illegal immigration/immigrants – predominantly people/students who overstay their visas – who number over 1 million people according to recent internal Home Office documentation. A lot of this is a consequence of the dramatic cuts, poor outsourcings, mismanagement of resources etc. that we've seen over the last three decades, a reality highlighted in the excellent book "Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All" that I presented in this post.]
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